Mad Max: Fury Road is hands down my favourite film so far this year, and it's set a high bar to get over for the remaining six months. I have a somewhat odd record with the previous 3 films — the original film didn't interest me all that much — it lacks the gonzo post-apocalypse elements of the later […]

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Or maybe 2014, as that's the year under the microscope. The shortlist has been out a while, the ceremony is Wednesday 6th May, so there's just time for me to vent my minuscule opinions on the subject before the rather better informed panel of judges proves me wrong. So… in name order:
The Girl with all the Gifts […]

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One of the many things I am not is a webcomic artist. However, this was not always the case. My past has murkier things in it than you can possibly imagine. I once ran a strip for the BBC Berkshire website, and I have cartooned for Mongoose publishing (kind of briefly) and a few other sites (with a fantasy strip called Big […]

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Did I do that joke last year? There are a limited number of axe-related puns in the world, honestly.
Anyway, it's that time of year (a bit later than the same time last year, if that makes any sense at all) when someone has to get axed. The Gemmell Awards have opened up for voting on the longlists, […]

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Eastersprosiumcon was a great fun weekend, albeit somewhat expensive when you tot everything up (1). Caught up with all the great and the good (or the scum and the villainy) that constitute the con-going author and publishing bods. My panel items all went well — we had a YA panel with the unusual benefit of having an […]

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Firstly, and before everything gets transmuted to Dysprosium (2), I had an awesome time at Luxcon. I got to pal around the Peadar O Guilin and Aliette de Bodard — both authors whose work I tremendously admire. I got to play in a zombie survival game — as myself — run by local GM Ben, and I and the other guests got […]

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I blogged a while back about getting massively into podcasts, which remains a definite thing whenever I am going from place to place and not able to bury my nose in a bo0k. I am currently awaiting new episodes Tea and Jeopardy, Geek Syndicate, Rachel and Myles X-plain the X-men, Shut Up And Sit Down, Galactic Suburbia, the Starburst Bookworm […]

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Very tempted to call this one "Too Many Cooks" but that would be entirely unjust.
This follows my earlier post going over the first half of Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series which, for ease of reference, can be found here.
We've seen so far a fantasy series with buried Old-tech elements, and we've seen […]

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Literature has lost one of its greats today. Not just genre literature, but literature as a whole — a household name and a man of a profoundly complex canon presented wrapped in two often underrated fields: speculative fiction and comedy.
It is probably a small thing, on the grand scale, but my most personal tribute would be to say that he […]

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There was a to-and-fro on Twitter recently about RPG systems and book settings that got me thinking about the idea again. I've often thought about turning Shadows of the Apt into an RPG — it would give it a pleasing circularity, if nothing else, given the world's origins. There are a lot of very good worlds out there […]